


From the Soul, the Dust of Everyday Life

by eelegy



Category: PRISTIN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Artist AU, F/F, Jieqiong finds a box of paintings, the rest is history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2020-11-01 05:54:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20810174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eelegy/pseuds/eelegy
Summary: Crossposted from AFF





	1. a work of art dies not

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted from AFF

Jieqiong loves her job. Really, she does. So maybe not all of it is amazing, like how the archives in the basement of the museum are freezing or how the nearest bathroom that doesn’t consistently have a line is three floors up, but the actual work part is genuinely fun. Jieqiong has not regretted her decision to work abroad this summer for a single day. For museum studies grad student Jieqiong, working in an art museum’s archives is a dream come true, especially given she’s only two semesters into her masters. According to her supervisor, someone without a graduate degree getting a paying job at Leeum is unheard of, and it’s especially impressive that she, as a foreigner, got the job. Jieqiong tries not to let that knowledge go to her head.

Leeum isn’t exactly a brand new museum, but the archives are relatively new and very unorganized. Jieqiong’s job is to take the unsorted artwork, label it, and put it in the right area. For Jieqiong, the thrill of seeing art that almost no one knows exists more than makes up for the tediousness of the job. She’s a few weeks in and has developed a good rhythm when, as she is restacking crates holding dynastic Korean paintings, a mid-sized crate in the corner catches her eye.

It’s old, or at least it looks old. The wood is cracked and dented, and it’s definitely not the plywood that most of the art is transported in. Jieqiong puts down two Joseon Dynasty crates to get a closer look. It’s nailed shut, and from the look of it, it has been for a while. The nails don’t have the modern round heads. In fact, they look almost hand-made.

Abandoning her work, Jieqiong carries the crate over to one of the work tables. It’s heavier than she expected. She figures it must be packed with, well, art probably. The work tables are outfitted with art repair tools: magnifying glasses, glue, brushes, but there is also a toolkit that is mostly used for breaking down frames and canvas stretchers.

Jieqiong grabs the crowbar and tests its weight a few times before turning to the crate. Jieqiong has never done this before, but she figures it can’t be too hard. After all, every treasure movie has at least one scene with a crowbar. 

Turns out it’s a lot harder than the actors make it look, or maybe it’s the age of the wood or the kind of nails. Rusty nails are probably grippier, after all. When Jieqiong finally gets it open, she’s broken a sweat. She takes off her hoodie and wipes her forehead with it. 

When Jieqiong catches her breath and takes a good look inside, she loses her breath all over again. The crate is packed to the brim with scrolls upon scrolls of considerably aged paper. Jieqiong thinks it might even be Goryeo or Joseon-era paper, given the quality. Jieqiong wonders if anyone even knows this crate exists.

Jieqiong sets the crate on a mid-height platform and pulls up a stool, having already given up on her work for the day. Discovering potentially unknown artwork Korean artwork is much more important. 

Jieqiong pulls out an armful of scrolls and dumps them on the work table. She carefully unrolls the first one and gasps. It’s beautiful. For how beaten up the crate looked, it did an incredible job of preserving the art. The scene is of a hill with a village in the background. The colors so are unbelievably vibrant that Jieqiong thinks this must be a prank, but she knows the signs of a modern reproduction. This is the real deal.

Jieqiong carefully unrolls the rest, putting weights on the ends to keep them open. She turns on the overhead light to see them better and almost chokes up at the sight. They’re all so beautiful. Whoever painted these was a master of his trade. From views from atop mountains to scenic beaches, the artist captured the life of each landscape.

Jieqiong is sure that the same artist did each one, and she needs to see more. She carefully rolls up the first set and puts them aside, taking another armful from the crate.

This batch is just as beautiful last the first, but these depicted scenes with people. Some were of markets, and Jieqiong could place the clothing as early Joseon Dynasty, others were of fields, others still were of paper makers, something that Jieqiong had rarely seen depicted visually, and she had never seen it done so brilliantly. In fact, the artist seemed to have done a series on paper makers, especially those whose work was the most taxing.

Jieqiong needs more. The artwork is so vibrant, it seems to come to life before Jieqiong’s eyes. She’s completely captivated by it. She grabs another armful. She’s not even halfway through.

The next batch is much like the last, but there are two paintings that feel out of place among the others. While most depict peasant life, two of the paintings are of a grandiose building. Jieqiong infers that it’s a palace, maybe even the Joseon palace. The architecture of the building is quite similar to many depictions of the royal palace.

It’s clear that this artist was a traveller, or had, at least, traveled some. Jieqiong wonders what it must be like to be in the presence of that sort of majesty of nature. Then she wonders what it must be like to translate the beauty of the world into thousands of deft brushstrokes.

As Jieqiong takes another armful of scrolls from the box, one topples from the top of the pile and knocks against the floor with a hollow sound. Jieqiong winces and puts the rest of the scrolls on the table before retrieving the fallen one.

The next batch is nearly all focused around the palace. There are elaborate rituals and people wearing lavish clothing. There is are several formal portraits of what Jieqiong assumes are members of the court.

Then suddenly, Jieqiong is looking at a painting of herself. Or rather, Jieqiong corrects herself, she is looking at a picture of a woman identical to her who lived hundreds of years ago.


	2. to love, to hope, to tremble, to live

Jieqiong blinks and rubs her eyes. It’s only eleven and she’s only been at work for a few hours, but maybe the fluorescent lights are getting to her. She's not famous enough to be Punk'd, right? And why would Ashton even be here?

She shakes her head to clear it and takes another look at the picture. It’s impossible. She knows that, but it’s her, albeit in historic traditional Korean clothing, which is confusing to Jieqiong, who takes great pride in her Chinese heritage. More than just Korean clothing, they’re expensive Korean clothes. And the fact that it is a formal portrait tips her off that this woman was part of court. From the dragon hairpin, Jieqiong can assume that this woman was royalty.

Jieqiong goes deeper, hoping to uncover more about her doppelgänger. Her next armful is primarily paintings of the woman. There are several more formal portraits of her like the first one she came across, but there are also sketches and studies. Single color gestural drawings and two-tone quick paintings. There are a few more of the beautiful landscapes mixed into the batch, but Jieqiong no longer cares. She needs to know more about this woman and her relationship to the artist that justified the sheer number of pieces in which she is the subject.

The paintings in the next batch make her falter. They are more intimate. There are paintings of her laying in the grass, hair mussed and clothing rumpled with a soft smile. There are paintings of her sleeping, lit by a soft morning light. Jieqiong never pays much mind when people tell her that she’s beautiful. It’s not that she doesn’t think she is, it’s just that she’s never given it much thought. At least, until now. Looking at the paintings of a version of her from centuries ago, she is hit with a sort of narcissistic love for herself. Jieqiong hadn’t thought artist painted like this back then.

She carries on. It’s funny; Jieqiong had known about this artist for only about an hour, yet she feels like she knows him. Then she unrolls the next painting. If she had faltered before, she was frozen now. The painting is much more intense, but it still has the fluid brushstrokes that Jieqiong considers the artist’s signature. The painting uses a lot more ink than any of the previous works; it's as if the artist wanted to describe something that wasn’t a matter of a few delicate strokes. And it’s easy to see why. There she is, nude, in the throes of ecstasy, grasping the fabric behind her head, mouth open in a frozen cry. Jieqiong’s breath catches. This isn’t the way that a royal was painted. This was something that seemed like it could have been torn from the sort of book that’s hidden deep in the palace library. This was the sort of thing that Jieqiong would usually not be fazed by, but Jieqiong can feel herself flush and her collar feels awfully tight all of a sudden and the archives are no longer cold.

There are several of these sort of paintings, each affecting Jieqiong more. Jieqiong never understood the point of porn before. It never lived up to the real thing — why watch fake sex when you could have the contact of a real person. Sure, she figured, for people who were uncomfortable with others, it was probably a nice way to let off some steam, but Jieqiong much preferred having someone else’s hands on her. But now she understands. 

Maybe if all porn was this intense, this intimate, this beautiful, Jieqiong would like it more. As it is, she's frozen, all too affected by a series of historic erotic paintings that she is sure were not meant for public eyes.

They all seem to be set in the same, simple room with robes strewn over the floor and slipping off the bed. It’s a woman’s room, from what Jieqiong can tell, and she surprised that a princess’s room isn’t fancier. 

Each new painting she looks at has her blushing anew. In one, she is sitting on the edge of what Jieqiong guesses is a bed, looking down at the artist, her legs spread, and the robes that had slipped from her shoulder obscuring the juncture of her thighs. In another, she is laying down, topless, a smirk on her face and hair spread around her head like a halo. She is reaching up, Jieqiong thinks, to cup the artist’s face. In yet another, she is hovering over the artist, her hair framing the painting in black, a wicked look on her face. 

There are nearly a dozen of these paintings, each making Jieqiong shift more in her seat. She is all too aware of how deeply unprofessional this is, but she can’t stop. She’s suddenly glad that she is the only person who works Fridays. Jieqiong can’t stop staring at the woman, at herself, portrayed in such an intimate way. She wants someone like this lover. She, well, she wants just about anyone right now, but the way the artist portrays the intimacy makes her ache. The paintings are always from the perspective of the lover. Then Jieqiong realizes: the artist must have been the lover.


	3. how many emperors and how many princes

Jieqiong has never been much of a romantic. She’s never bought into White Day or Valentine’s Day or the Disney stories, but she wants this - what this version of her from centuries ago had. She wants to lay out in the sun with her lover on a grassy hill. She wants to go hiking, to go traveling, even to just sit at home with her lover. She wants to look at someone the way she looks at the artist in those paintings.

An alarm goes off suddenly, starting Jieqiong so violently she slams her elbow onto the table, sending a shooting pain up to her fingertips. She winces, shaking out the tingles. It takes a minute for her to realize that the alarm in coming from her phone, and another few seconds for her to realize that it means her shift is over. 

She pulls her phone out and snoozes the alarm. She slips it back into her left back pocket before turning back to the painting spread across the table. She hadn’t realized how long she had spent examining the pictures. She gives the table another once over before swiveling and looking at the crate a few feet away. Somehow, it feels wrong to leave the paintings here. Jieqiong doesn’t know why she feels a surge of anger when she imagines another person looking at the paintings. They aren’t hers; she knows that, yet her skin prickles at the thought of her artist’s artwork on display. She reasons that it’s probably because the subject looks so muck like her. Some of the pictures are quite explicit.

Jieqiong knows she could lose her job. She knows she could be arrested. Deported. She might never be able to come back to Korea. It’s the stupidest thing she will ever do. She doesn’t care. All she knows is that no one else can look at those pictures.

Having the idea to sneak paintings out of a museum and actually sneaking them out are very different things. Jieqiong knows she has about fifteen minutes until the guard, Kang, comes in to lock up. She wishes she had paid more attention to those heist movies now.

Jieqiong has never been the reckless type. She doesn’t have the heart for it, and that’s never been more evident to her than now, as she puts the crate in a larger box and piles binders and loose paperwork on top of the paintings. Her heart is being so heavily that Jieqiong is afraid she might pass out. Every warning bell in her brain is going off. Every word of warning from parents and teachers is playing in her head on loop. Yet the crate is driving her on. She needs these paintings.

Jieqiong takes a deep breath and lifts the box with a little difficulty and makes her way across the basement to the stairway. There’s a special staff exit, and she’s never been gladder. The security at Leeum is tight at the main entrance, but Kang is the only guard on duty at the back entrance and she’s more concerned with people going in that people leaving. 

Jieqiong makes her way past the guard station, which is empty. She’s too relieved to wonder where Kang is until she hears footsteps. She turns around and squeezes her eyes shut, ready to be cuffed and dragged to jail right then and there, but the footsteps fade and Jieqiong lets out a breath. She makes her way to the car that she had borrowed from her landlord because of the weather that morning and heaves the box into the passenger seat. She’s safe.

Over the next month, she goes through the motions at work and races home to the crate. If anyone noticed the difference in her level of interest, they hadn’t said anything. Jieqiong knows she’s not the most social person out there, especially in Korea, where she still struggles with the language a little. Her landlord, her only real friend in Korea, say it isn’t bad, but the awkward silences when she is teaching for a word tell a different story. Her lack of a social life, while a negative thing before, has become valuable. She never has to turn down a coworker asking her out for drinks or to karaoke. She has no one to comment on her lack of interest in almost anything or her recent transformation into a homebody. There is no one to distract her from her artist.

It’s an obsession. She knows that, and she knows it’s not healthy. She has started to dream in the painting style of her artist. She finds connections to him in everything she does, from walking down the stairs to frying an egg. Her life revolves around her artist, and she might be ashamed, except she can’t care enough to be.

Jieqiong needs to know everything about him. She figures her doppelgänger must have been a princess, and the artist a painter at court, but she can’t place the time or place.

There are clues. Jieqiong knows there have to be. If she had learned anything in her art history classes, she learned that there are clues in every painting. And something wasn’t adding up.

Jieqiong spends two weeks staring at the paintings of her with no progress. It’s frustrating to the point that she’s losing sleep. Kang comments on her increasingly haggard appearance. She doesn’t care, except she does. Losing sleep means she’s not getting any closer to finding her artist.

It’s a Thursday at around one in the morning when she realizes that the answer has been staring her in the face for the past two weeks. Or rather, an answer. She turns her light on and springs out of bed and rushes to the crate, digging to the bottom, where the landscapes and town scenes had fallen from her not pulling them out to look at. She lays them out on the floor by her bed and crosses the room to get a hoodie and sweatpants. In order to preserve the paintings, Jieqiong had been leaving her heating on lower than usual. She’s thankful that it isn’t summer and that she’s actually saving money this way. She crosses back across the room and kneels over the paintings, carefully unrolling them and holding them open with trinkets that she finds under her bed.

When she has them all laid out, she stands up and steps away, looking over all of the scenes. She turns and grabs her laptop from her desk, powering it up and setting it on her bed behind her. Paper molding. The clothing makes it clear that it can’t be later than the early 1500s. Paper molding. Paper. The colored paper that the villagers are making means the paintings had have been created after 1400. This is definitely Joseon Dynasty.

Jieqiong looks closer at one of the paintings in particular. In the corner, there is a man sitting with a small scrap of paper and a brush. The detail is so small that the markings on the paper aren’t distinct, but from the way the dots are aligned on the scrap, Jieqiong thinks the artist must have intended it to look like writing. The man’s clothing is simple, too. It’s clear he isn’t meant to be someone of a high class. A writing system designed for common folk. Jieqiong thinks a little and turns to her computer, pulling up a page on King Sejong. 1418 to 1450. Jieqiong hadn’t realized he had ruled for so long. She sits back on the edge of her bed. The art had to have been created after, Jieqiong looks back at the web page, 1446. She nods to herself. She isn’t satisfied. Not by far, but having a roughly 60 year period in which the art could have been created isn’t bad, Jieqiong thinks. Not bad at all.


	4. there is something in consciousness

Jieqiong’s momentum disappears as quickly as it appears. She’s frustrated. She knows that a sixty year period isn’t bad for placing an artwork, but this isn’t just artwork. Jieqiong knows that there is an answer somewhere. She just has to find it

However much her sleep had suffered before, it’s gotten worse. Jieqiong is sleeping more, but feeling less and less rested. It’s because of the dreams, she guesses. She doesn't remember a lot about them, but she knows the dreams are much more vivid than normal. Two mornings ago, she woke up from one sure that she felt a lingering touch on her shoulder and the shift of her bed as someone got up, but when she turned over to see who it was, the room was empty and the other side of her bed was cold.

Jieqiong thinks she must be going a little crazy. The dreams are far too real to not be, but she knows it’s impossible. They must just be particularly vivid.

A week after the dreams start, Jieqiong buys a book on analyzing dreams. Jieqiong finds the book wholly unhelpful, but it's the only thing she has that has even a possibility of helping her, so each time she wakes up, she clings to something in her dream to look up.

In her first dream after buying the book, she feels long fingers curling around her upper arms. According to the book, "to dream that you are being touched represents your closeness and/or relationship with a particular person." Jieqiong doesn't know the identity of the person, so this means absolutely nothing to her. It's frustrating. If she at least had a face, she might feel like she was going somewhere.

Jieqiong had a sense that her dreams were connected to the box in the corner of her room, but is absolutely convinced when she wakes up from a dream in which silk was slid from her shoulders and dropped to the floor. Unfortunately, all the book had to say was "to see or feel silk in your dream represents luxury, smoothness, and softness." It's infuriatingly vague, and Jieqiong, running on long nights of restless sleep, almost throws the book out the window.

In an embarrassingly heated dream, Jieqiong feels a firm cushion under her back as lips trail down her neck, between the valley of her breasts, and to-Jieqiong almost screams when she wakes up. It's enough that her dreams are preventing her from feeling rested, but the fact that they're doing this now? Jieqiong huffs in frustration before throwing off the covers and making her way to the bathroom for a cold shower. When she gets out, she's cooled down enough to look up "bed" in the book. "To see a bed in your dream represents your intimate self and discovery of your sexuality. You are exhibiting some carelessness in your sexual behavior." Jieqiong throws the book out this time. As if her dream wasn't enough, the book decided it would rub it in that she hadn't had any sexual behavior to be careless about in too long.

Jieqiong flops on her unmade bed and runs her fingers through her hair. She needs to get laid.

After she throws out the book, she starts to remember her dreams more clearly. Things in her life begin to trigger her to remember her dreams as well. On the way to work, she passes by a fountain in the park. Suddenly, she is hit with the memory of the dripping rain gauge, a soft breeze tickling the baby hairs on the back of her neck, a soft hand sliding down her arm to grab her hand to lead her-The memory cuts off. Or the dream does. Jieqiong doesn’t know anymore. She’s also put off by the fact that she knows that things outside the immediate dream. The dripping is coming from a rain gauge, something Jieqiong has never heard nor seen in person, yet she knows that’s what the sound is coming from.

It feels real. Too real. They can't just be dreams. Jieqiong is convinced there is something more. It’s as if she is living in snippets of the past. She entertains thoughts of the Harry Potter memory bowl. She's never believed in reincarnation. It's a silly concept. One that monks and grandparents believe, and maybe some kids with their heads in the clouds, but these memories are real. She can feel it. She sees details that she wouldn't have learned about. Not even through working in the museum. How would she know the sound of glue boiling in large pots? Or the smell? How would she know the feeling of the heavy braid that she wore in her hair when she went out? Jieqiong doesn’t have an explanation other than remembering it from a past life.

The dreams start to become less vivid, even faded. Then they cease entirely. Jieqiong knows she should feel happy that she is finally getting a full night’s sleep after nearly three weeks. It had even affected her work, something Jieqiong would have never let happen before the crate. Park, her boss, pretends not to see the circles under Jieqiong’s eyes for about a week. Jieqiong knows she sees them; she can feel her boss’ eyes on her when she’s not looking. But Jieqiong is thankful Park never says a thing, at least until Jieqiong falls asleep standing by the middle Joseon era portrait crates and Park, having come back in to grab her bag, notices Jieqiong, who has stayed far past her shift has ended. She wakes Jieqiong and tells her to take a break. Jieqiong doesn't want to, tries to fight, hates the stern, motherly look Park gives her but is too tired to put up much of a fight. Jieqiong knows she should feel thankful that she can give her work her all, but she can’t help but feel a sense of loss. Of what, Jieqiong doesn’t know. But she feels it all the same.

×


	5. no more human, no less

Since the dreams had faded, Jieqiong hasn’t made any progress on discovering who the artist was, and not for lack of trying. Jieqiong takes advantage of her newly restful nights of sleep and stays up later, bent over her laptop, trying to piece together something, anything that might give away who the artist is. Jieqiong has hit a block. Jieqiong is sure it shows too. Even her boss, Park, has been looking at her worriedly, although, Jieqiong supposes, that could be from the time Park caught her asleep on the job.

Just as she’s starting to lose steam, thinking that she’ll never know anything about the artist, she has a three-am realization. The room is too plain for a princess’ room. In the more than a dozen paintings that depict more than the bed, there is almost no decor, no ornate carvings on the furniture or beautiful jewelry on the table. With another artist, Jieqiong might think the lack of detail a style choice, but the artist depicts the room so carefully that Jieqiong can’t help but to think that this is what the room looked like.

Jieqiong springs out of bed and slides into her slippers, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders to ward off the cold. She can’t be bothered to pull on pants. She needs to know now. 

She crosses the room to her desk and the crate next to it. She removes the quilt she’d lain over the crate to hide and protect it and digs around for the paintings of the room. When she has them all laid out on the floor of her bedroom, she surveys them. She’s right. The room is really too plain for royalty. Jieqiong furrows her eyebrows. If this wasn’t her doppelgänger’s room, whose was it?

Jieqiong purses her lips in thought and plops down in front of the paintings. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the artist was only depicting the woman as royalty. Maybe she was-no. Jieqiong is certain that her doppelgänger was part of the royal family. But how? Who?

Jieqiong glances over the paintings once more. They’re the same pictures she’s been looking at for the past few weeks. She begins to look more closely at the backgrounds of the more…intimate images, not letting herself get distracted my the subject’s - her - state of undress. Or the filthy faces her doppelgänger is making. Or the clarity by which the artist depicted the strands of hair plastered to her doppelgänger’s forehead by sweat. The room is plain. Like Jieqiong had thought, the room is much less lavishly decorated than the portrayals of the Joseon palace she is more familiar with. Although, Jieqiong thinks, there is no proof the luxury of the public rooms in the palace was not for show. Jieqiong briefly entertains the idea of royalty having plain rooms before dismissing it. 

Something is off. Maybe it’s the quality of light. Although the artist could have fudged that, Jieqiong knows the care he puts into the light in the rest of his pieces and has no doubt he recreated the atmosphere well. Jieqiong looks closely at one in which her doppelgänger is sitting on the edge of the bed naked, facing away from the artist in such a way that her profile and the swell of her breasts are just visible and putting up her hair. Jieqiong tears her eyes away from the subject and looks more closely at the background, hoping something, anything, will pop out at her to give her a clue.

When nothing does, she sighs and rubs her hand over her face, pushing herself up onto her knees so she can start rolling the paintings up again. It was a stupid idea, she tells herself. There’s nothing left. You need to acknowledge a dead end, Jieqiong, she admonishes herself as she finishes rolling up the first painting.

Then the painting furthest from her catches her eye. In the piece, her doppelgänger is laying down looking up at the artist, hair spread in tendrils across the fabric covering the bed. There’s sex in her eyes and Jieqiong feels her cheeks warm as her eyes travel down to the darker splotches on and around her breasts. She lets her eyes trace the rest of her doppelgänger’s body, seeing the drops of sweat at her hairline and the ever so faint teeth mark on her shoulder.

Jieqiong blinks hard and looks away from the painting. Now wasn't the time for her body to respond like this. She looks to the floor of the room in the painting, which takes up a considerable portion of the side of the piece, an interesting composition choice that feels, to Jieqiong, more like a snapshot than a painting. Then something catches Jieqiong’s eye.

What she had thought were two paintbrushes on the floor actually seemed to be two Binyeo, traditional hairpins. Jieqiong knows that the ornate one belonged to her doppelgänger. She wore it in first painting Jieqiong saw of her. The other sported a simple flower shaped tip, the standard style for those who were neither wealthy nor poor.

It takes Jieqiong a moment to process the discovery, but when she does, it hits her hard, making her sit back. The painting she’s holding rolls out of her hand and under her bed. Her lover was a woman.

Jieqiong lets that thought sink in for a minute before it really hits her. When it does, she scrambles to the crate to pull out the more intimate drawings, seeing them in a new light. She pieces the rest together then. The interior rooms had seemed simple for someone in court, but because of the accessories laying around and feminine appearance of the room, Jieqiong had assumed it was hers and not a male lover’s. The darkness curtaining the edges of several of the more intimate pictures was not a stylistic choice, but the lover’s hair.

Her lover was a woman.

×

×


	6. a scream of freedom

Jieqiong sits back heavily upon the realization. Her lover was a woman.

Her lover was a woman.

Oh.

She stands in a daze and makes her way around her paintings to her bed, not bothering to pick them up.

_Oh._

She falls asleep to the feeling of long, delicate fingers brushing the baby hairs on the back of her neck to trace landscapes across the smooth canvas of her shoulders.

Jieqiong goes to work the next day holding as much knowledge of the artist as she will ever get, and it’s enough. It’s not, it will never be, but it’s as much as she’ll ever get and she has to convince herself to let it rest. It’s enough. It’s her mantra. It’s enough. Or, it is until she is organizing the labeled crates and accidentally kicks a stack of very old, brittle apaper bound together by a strip of deep purple cloth. She looks around for a crate with a loose top it might have slipped out of, but all of the crates in this section are well sealed. She knows because this is the section where she found the crate which, she reminds herself, she isn’t supposed to think about. She had looked around for another similar crate to that one weeks back with no luck.

Jieqiong picks it up. The paper crinkles a little with age, and a tiny torn piece on one of the edges falls off. Jieqiong presses her lips together. It’s enough she reminds herself. But it really isn’t, and Jieqiong can’t help but feel a rush of maybe.

She crosses the room to the table and sits down, turning on the fluorescent table lamp. She unbinds the stack of papers and impatiently tries to flip through them. A mistake. The paper cracks and Jieqiong winces at her carelessness. She examines it more carefully this time and realizes the stack is stuck together in a block. She huffs a breath and reaches under the table to get a kit for minor restoration work. It’s a tricky process, and it takes Jieqiong a few pages to work out a system to peel apart the paper. It takes her nearly four hours and a few close calls to work all of the pages apart. When she has the final pages finished, she sits back to survey her work and gasps. She had been so focused on her work that she hadn’t paid any attention to the contents of the pages. She’s looking what is essentially an artist’s sketchbook. And she’d know that style anywhere.

It’s a thick stack of paper, and she doesn’t know whether to surprised that, upon a quick glance across the table, most of the sketches and paintings are of her doppelgänger. The sketches are the sort that even the artist, who unabashedly painted a member of the court in the most intimate of situations, would hide in a notebook. If she didn’t want the others to see the first paintings of her doppelgänger, they absolutely couldn’t see these.

Jieqiong looks around and then pulls out her phone to check the time. She only has about an hour left on her shift, and that’s not nearly enough time to give this collection the attention it needs. She slips the stack of papers into her purse and pulls her sweater over top to cover them. When she leaves, Kang tiredly waves her through. She takes quick, steady steps to the car she borrowed that morning to pick up groceries for her landlord and as soon as she slides into the driver’s seat and sets her bag on the passenger’s, she lets out a sigh of relief.

When Jieqiong gets home, she crosses her bedroom to her desk, hopping to avoid the painting still unrolled across the floor, and sets her bag on the chair. She takes out the stack of sketches and sets it on her desk before tossing her bag onto her bed and pulling out the chair to sit down.

Her desk isn’t big, so Jieqiong goes through the pages in batches of three. It reminds her of the night she found the crate, and she swallows heavily. Maybe, she considers, it’s best to not know. Maybe for all this looking, I’ll only find disappointment.

She shakes her head. No. She needs this. Something pushes her to take a seat and draws her hand towards the stack. 

The first batch of three are of a woman, Jieqiong assumes it’s her doppelgänger, sitting under a tree a good distance from the artist. The light stokes and the inclusion of small flowers in the grass lead Jieqiong to believe that the sketch was done mid-morning, and probably in the late spring. In the first two, she is looking away from the artist towards something in the distance that the artist either couldn’t see or didn’t deem important enough to include. In the third, the woman is looking at the artist, but the face is too small to include much detail. Still, they are beautiful.

The next three are unmistakably of her doppelgänger. The artist is closer to her subject now. Jieqiong stutters over the “her” in her thought. Her artist being a woman is something Jieqiong wants to smack herself for not considering. In these and the next batch, the artist portrays her doppelgänger up close doing rather courtly things. In two, she sits in a beautifully ornate chair, wearing beautifully ornate clothing. In another, her face is contorted in concentration as she completes a piece of Hanja calligraphy.

It’s in the fourth batch that Jieqiong finds sketches that make her pause as she sets them out. In the first, she is disrobing, back to the artist. Her robes hang off of one hand and pool on the floor. She looks back at the artist with a shy, hesitant smile. The next two pieces do not have full faces but are instead close ups of a body. In one, a hand is just closing over a breast. From the shading, Jieqiong can see the pressure of the thumb cupping the bottom and the light brushes of the fingers skimming over the surface. The other sketch is of a thumb hooking into a mouth open in either a deep breath or a scream. Jieqiong can see the moisture on the thin lips and on the knuckle of the thumb. There is hair plastered to the jaw with sweat. The neck, which takes up half of the small page, is visibly strained and shiny with sweat.

Jieqiong wets her lips and tears her eyes away to clear her head. Her heart is beating hard as she shifts a little in her seat and sets out the next batch, hoping for a bit of a break. Maybe a couple pictures of a picnic to cool down.

There is no reprieve from the images in the next batch. In the first, she clutches the fabric behind her head with one hand and her own breast with the other. Her mouth frozen open in an upwards curve. Her hair is spread across the background like a dark halo and her baby hairs are plastered to her forehead. The second has her nearly gasping aloud. Her first thought is, “she is a member of royalty.” If anyone anywhere were to have seen this picture, Jieqiong is sure many would have died. In the piece, more of the artist is visible than in any other work Jieqiong has seen. The artist is laying back, looking down her body. Jieqiong registers the artist’s small breasts and the dark splotches littered down her abdomen, but most of her attention is focused on her doppelgänger laying between the artist’s bent knees, one hand clutching up high on the artist’s leg, the other hand out of view, but from the cant of her doppelgänger’s shoulders, Jieqiong can guess where the hand is. Her doppelgänger’s face is half-obscured behind the juncture of the artist’s thighs, and the earnest look in the upwards glance of her eyes has Jieqiong breathing hard in an odd, sort of narcissistic way. The third is tamer in comparison to the other two, but not by much. It is a close-up of her doppelgänger’s face, lips parted and tongue working around long, slim fingers. She is giving the artist a filthy look and her right eye is closed a little more than the left in a smirk, something that has Jieqiong reeling. That’s her thing! Her right eye closes more when she smirks! Jieqiong shuts her eyes for a moment to process. If the quirks are the same, then this must be more than just a coincidental doppelgänger.


	7. more clearly in dreams

Around three-quarters of the way through the notebook, however, the style changes. Instead of beautifully rendered landscapes and portraits, there are rudimentary scribbles of simple objects. A binyeo, a scroll, a brush. Often, there are five or more objects to a page. There is no shading in these illustrations, and the line is shaky and unsure.

Jieqiong furrows her eyebrows. This isn’t her artist. A strangely fierce protective instinct washes over her at this sudden intrusion into her artist’s notebook before she catches herself. This is not her artist. No matter how much the woman in the paintings looks like her, this is not her artist. No matter how vivid her dreams of a time long ago have been, she does not know this artist or this woman.

Nevertheless, Jieqiong feels a sense of loss as she continues through the pages. Through the next few pages, Jieqiong sees steady improvement from the new artist, who had begun drawing flowers and then wider landscapes. The new artist begins to add rudimentary shading to her pieces. Then the subjects start to change again. A large, ornate building. Jieqiong thinks it must be the palace. A staircase, a tree, and then a very familiar room.

Jieqiong is surprised, at first, but she figures the new artist must be her doppelgänger. She feels a surge of pride for her, having learned to paint so well so fast. The new artist keeps drawing the room, angles and detail varying. This is the first time Jieqiong has gotten a close look at the room from varying places, and she drinks in every detail. There are scrolls of paper hastily shoved into a corner and the bed is messy, but the table across the room from the bed is neat, the ink and brushes aligned perfectly. There are not many clothes folded on the shelf, but Jieqiong spies a trunk in the corner that she thinks must contain more. The more she sees of this room, the more she sees the artist herself.

The artist is a messy person by nature, but only because her work means so much to her. She is feminine, based on the hairpieces and clothing on her shelf. And tall. Jieqiong doesn’t know how she knows this, but it is a fact that she cannot shake. Most of all, she is nostalgic. Jieqiong sees this in the growing collection of pressed flowers littering a low table near the artist’s bed and in the growing stack of papers tied into a neat package on the artist’s desk. Jieqiong realizes with a start that it must be the stack of papers she is looking through right now.

Then suddenly, a figure begins showing up in the drawings. First on a hillside. It’s only a gestural suggestion of a figure, but it’s unmistakably there. Then the figure becomes more pronounced. Through this next series of pictures, Jieqiong is given a tour of what Jieqiong assumes is the palace grounds, the figure, back always turned, is in every single one. Jieqiong doesn’t know how she knows it’s the same person, but something in her gut tells her it is.

And then she’s staring at a page of eyes, round and youthful looking. The entire page, in fact, is covered with them. Sometimes in pairs, other times rendered individually. Some are wide and alert, as if intently looking at the artist, others are narrowed, curled, in laughter or, gentler, a smile. There are others still in which the lids droop from exhaustion, even closing entirely. The care and affection in each drawing makes Jieqiong’s heart ache, but she cannot get enough.

Jieqiong eagerly moves to the next page, a page of noses and lips. She marvels at the delicacy of the features, the soft narrowness of the nose and the small, thin lips, almost always held in an impassive pout. Jieqiong runs her hand gently over one of the pairs of lips, imagining the soft skin and the pillowy give of the woman’s lips. She reaches up and touches her own, closing her eyes as she does so. She can almost imagine the light ghost of breath on her lips and the gentle press of another pa-

Jieqiong snaps her eyes open, shaking her head to clear the image. She huffs a laugh, feeling a bit pitiful for fantasizing about a faceless woman from centuries ago. She needs to sleep. She rises from her seat and begins to collect the pages when she knocks the unexamined stack askew, exposing the next page. Jieqiong can’t tear her eyes away. She’s looking at a full face. The woman has a round face that tapers to a small chin. A dot on her cheek suggests the ghost of a dimple. Her round eyes are big and are softened by the long, slim eyebrows that curve gently over her brow bone. Her delicate nose guides Jieqiong’s eyes down to the woman’s small, doll-like mouth, which is set in a teasing smirk. Jieqiong reaches up to touch something on her face and realizes with a start that she’s crying. The woman is beautiful and Jieqiong feels the clenching emptiness of longing in her heart for a woman she’s never met.

Jieqiong carefully takes the page and moves it aside, desperate to see more of the woman, to quell the sense of loss, but the next page is blank save for a small study of a flower done by a much more practiced hand. The artist’s. Jieqiong flips to the following page only to be met with the artist’s meaningless doodles of plants and animals. Jieqiong is reaching the bottom of the stack and the sense of loss is growing stronger with each page of immaculately done, but passionless studies.

Then there is a page of messy calligraphy. Jieqiong can only make out a few phrases. The words “most beautiful” and then “love” are messily scrawled, as if someone had just learned to write them.

After that, the pages are blank.

—

Hey all,

It’s been a while, I know. But I’m here now and I want to thank you all so much for sticking with me, even when I didn’t update for **over two years**. I’m getting back into writing now, and it’s been slow going, but I’m feeling good.

Elly

ps: the quote for this chapter is “Why do we see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?” by Leo DaVinci

×


	8. even in another time

Jieqiong is satisfied. She knows this is the last of the art. It’s illogical, but she can feel it. She slowly eases back into her routine from before the artist and the crate of paintings stowed away in a corner of her closet. Work is, well, it’s a good job and Jieqiong is thankful for it, but since her search for the artist ended, there isn’t much excitement. It’s okay. And Jieqiong is fine with being just okay. The worst is the boredom. Jieqiong has never been inclined to mechanical work, and without the hunt, that’s what her job had come to feel like. She tries her best to take extra care in the cataloguing of the new shipment of pieces, but the quiet of the basement unsettles her in a way it’s never before.

Jieqiong realizes: She’s lonely. Even though she’d never actually known the artist she chased, it gave her the feeling of running towards something, it staved off the lonely feeling of a foreign country where the only people she talked to regularly were the barista at the cafe down the street from the museum and her supervisor. Her life revolved around her work, and while that had satisfied her before and durning her hunt, now that she no longer had a goal, she felt the homesickness and isolation press in.

It’s not so bad, she thinks as she takes her lunch in the cafe, nursing her late and poking at her sandwich, watching the other customers go about their days, reading papers and having conversations. But it’s disconcerting to her. Back home in China, she had always been a social butterfly, going out every weekend with friends to bars and clubs and karaoke. Her calendar was always filled with social outings. Here, in Seoul, she didn’t have anyone to hang out with. She takes another look around the cafe, eyes lingering on the couple at the table next to hers, one woman telling an animated story to the other, who’s giggling softly at every plot twist. Jieqiong can’t help but feel a twist of jealousy. Yeah, Jieqiong is lonely.

She’s just about to wrap up her lunch and take it back to work with her when something, or rather someone, catches her eye through the window looking out to the street. It’s only a flash of a woman in ponytail brushing a lock of stray hair behind her ear with a spindly finger, but that fraction of a second is enough to have Jieqiong shoot out of her seat, startling the couple at the table next to hers, and rushing to the door, leaving her half-finished drink at the table. She pushes through the door and out onto the sidewalk, but in those few seconds, she’s lost the woman. Jieqiong can’t help but to feel that’s she’s lost more than a stranger.

She sits back down at her table, offering a sheepish apology to the couple looking warily at her from the table next to hers, and huffs in frustration. Maybe she needs to get out more. Maybe being cooped up in her apartment obsessing over an ancient artist was taking a toll on her sanity. Jieqiong makes a deal with herself: she is going to get a life.

For the record, she really does stick to her word. Every weekend, she dresses up and goes out, nurses a fruity drink and talks to a stranger, but she never feels a spark. It’s not a total loss. She’s become a regular at the bar a block down from her apartment and she’s made friends with the bartender, a tall woman names Minkyung with quick, nimble fingers that crank out complicated drinks with incredible precision and a wicked grin that follows her scathing remarks about the rowdy men who regularly hit on her. She’s taken, she says. It’s too bad, too. If she weren’t, Jieqiong could see herself trying her luck. She’s pretty and charming and not at all like the round-faced, stoic portrait that Jieqiong still sees on the backs of her eyelids.

She’s in the middle of a conversation with Minkyung about the latest episode of a crime show they discovered they both watch when a tall, neatly-groomed man slides up next to her with a shy smile. Jieqiong is charmed by his accent and stuttering Korean. He’s clearly a foreigner, and introduces herself as a university student on holiday. 

He’s cute enough and buys her a drink, so she keeps the conversation going, telling him about her job at the museum and her time in Korea. But as he starts leaning closer, she suddenly realizes this is the last place she’d like to be.

She’s gentle enough when she tells him she’s not interested, she thinks. And the smile doesn’t leave his face when he nods, then tilts his head, considering, so she is startled as he grabs her shoulder and Jieqiong is faced with the terrifying realization of just how big he is in comparison to her. Even if she was bigger, or him smaller, her head was spinning with the alcohol. She looks around, hoping to make eye contact with someone to assist her, but the bartender is focused on a group of women on the other side of the bar and everyone else seems preoccupied as well.

But she must have been putting out distress signals, because someone pulls him away and steps between them. Jieqiong is drunk, but she’s together enough to hear the whole interaction between the two.

“Back off, she isn’t interested.” The woman’s voice is soft, high. Jieqiong almost feels as though it’s a little familiar, but she can’t place it.

The guy, much less cute now that his brow is furrowed in frustration and anger, responds with a scoff. “Could’ve fooled me. She was all over me. Back off.” Jieqiong feels bad, she light not have asked this woman to step in, but she certainly signalled for it. And even though the woman had a few centimeters on her, neither of them were very big.

The woman reaches back and grabs for her hand, giving it a squeeze, as though sensing Jieqiong’s mental apology. “No can do.” Jieqiong swears she knows that voice. The memory itches at the edges of her mind. “That’s my girlfriend. 

The guy, an asshole, even if he is on the mark, laughs, mocking and booming, “That’s cute. You guys use that fake shit over here too?”

The woman turns towards her with a wry, knowing grin and jieqiong’s breath catches. She feels like she’s been hit by a brick. It’s like another person is being squeezed into her brain. In barely a few seconds, an entire lifetime has flickered across the backs of her eyelids. She barely catches the whispered, “Can I kiss you?” And has to clear her head enough to nod. then suddenly, lips are on hers and she’s home.

She’s felt these lips before. Hundreds of times. She knows this woman like she knows herself. How could she have forgotten?

“Nayoung?”

“Hey,” the woman - Nayoung - smiles at her. She knows this smile. “It’s been a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote is “…someone will remember us/I say/even in another time…” from Sappho.
> 
> I started this fic April 30th, 2017. It had about a two year hiatus, but I recently updated it, and I wanted to at least finish this before the decade ended. 
> 
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/roavwade)


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